Tony Linfjard Blog

Tom Anderson Hollow-T Electric Guitar

My Tom Anderson Hollow-T is my main electric guitar and I just love it. It’s just fantastic! It’s the perfect guitar for a band- or studio situation since it’s very versatile with many sound possibilities. And it sounds more ”fender” than a Fender guitar! However, I had to wait for a long time (12 years!) before it came into my hands.

Way back in 1988, I went to a well-known music store in my hometown in order to try a couple of custom made boutique guitars. I tried several guitars and they were good – but not good enough to match the high price tag. Almost all of these guitars were designed in a typical Fender Stratocaster-style, which I liked (and still like) very much. Apart from all the Stratocaster-style guitars there was one natural-coloured Telecaster-style guitar that I hadn’t tried yet. That guitar was a Tom Anderson Hollow-T. At that time I didn’t like the Fender Telecaster or Telecaster-style guitars in general. Furthermore, I didn’t like the look of this particular guitar in the shop. So, despite my distaste for the look of this Hollow-T I decided to give it a try anyway. It was amazing! The guitar was perfectly balanced and the action was magnificent. “What a fantastic guitar”, I remember that I thought. “This guitar is really worth all the money it costs”, I said to myself.

After many days of thinking to and fro I decided not to buy this fantastic guitar. I couldn’t afford it! It was too risky for my social situation at that time. “But one day in the future, when I have the money, I’m going to have such a guitar”, I told myself.

Five years later, in 1993, I had a lot of jobs as a musician and my economy was pretty good. Now, it was time for a good custom made guitar – a Tom Anderson Hollow-T. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any Tom Anderson guitars at all in my hometown or in the rest of Sweden. When I called the Swedish agency for Tom Anderson guitars, they told me that they only got two guitars every sixth months to Sweden and those guitars were usually pre-booked. On top of this problem, the guitars were very expensive because of the high dollar currency at that time. In addition, I didn’t like the idea of choosing between only one or two guitars – especially when they were so expensive. “What if I get a guitar that I don’t like?”, I asked myself. Instead, I bought another very good guitar and decided to wait for my Tom Anderson until some day I would go to the U.S.A.

The years went by and I was happy with all my guitars and all my other instruments too. I worked hard in my studio and produced a lot of corporate music but also my own albums. In the year 2000 I was awarded “World Medal” for best music & lyrics together with lyricist Pierre Breidensjö in “The New York Film Festival”. This prize was for a campaign song to the car Volvo S80. It was time to go to the U.S.A. and New York to get the prize that I’d been awarded.

I was so happy for this prize and to go to New York that I really wanted to treat myself with something extra … ”I’m going to buy myself a Tom Anderson Hollow-T in New York”, was the first idea that came up in my mind – of course! 🙂

A couple of days after the prize ceremony I rented a car and drove to the Guitar Center in East Brunswick, New Jersey. I had called them the day before and they told me that there were sixteen Tom Anderson guitars in the shop. Sixteen Tom Anderson guitars! Wow! This was heaven for me! 🙂 When in the shop, I spent about four hours trying out all sixteen guitars. And naturally I tried them unplugged and acoustic in order to hear the basic tone quality of the guitars. They were all good but two appealed to me more than the others: one Hollow-T tobacco brown and one Hollow-T sunburst. To me, the sunburst one sounded brighter than the tobacco brown, which was the mellower one. I liked both but thought that the bright one would be more useful for me in the studio (or in an orchestra situation). However, I wasn’t sure if there were any tone differences between the guitars. Maybe I thought the tobacco one was mellower because of its colour. I wasn’t sure about it.

I asked the salesman if he could listen and tell me what he heard when I played the instruments. He listened and told me that both sounds very good (of course he was the salesman) and that the sunburst is a little bit brighter in its tone. I was right and immediately decided to buy my excellent Tom Anderson Hollow-T sunburst built in August 1996. So there I finally got my beloved guitar in my hands after 12 (!) long years of waiting.